"Cat's Cradle" Carling Hale, Lauren Cardenas, and Allison Kuo

The impetus for this project came from a moment of spontaneous play between friends that we happened to document a couple of years ago. Lauren and Alison were twirling around a cigarette butt that had become entangled in some art materials during a party, when we suddenly became involved in an intense, freeform game of cat’s cradle. Carling took a few photos, and the memory of the experience stuck with all of us. Like anyone else, we were just amusing ourselves by making a little sculpture toy out of the flotsam in our environment. What we have decided to do is elaborate on our experiment by recreating it, shooting photographs of our performance, and then using those images to draw, stitch, stretch, weave and sculpt our ideas into the gallery space.

We have been helping one another to make art for years, and have habitually used our collaboration as a way to alleviate the seriousness of personal art making while also pushing each other to try new approaches to our respective media. We hope to extend that spirit of useful play to the people who come to visit our installation at Co-Lab.